Traditionally, personal computers included operating systems, applications, and user settings for a single user. However, many organizations are now using clouds of computing resources to fulfill their computing needs. The clouds of computing resources generally allow for the operating systems, applications, and user settings of multiple users to be included on a single physical machine. Desktop virtualization technology allows multiple instances of a guest operating system to be kept separate within a normal host operating system, so the activities of one user may not affect the experience of other users. Typically methods for managing the power consumption and heat generation of physical host, include consolidating several virtual machines onto a minimal number of physical host allowing inactive or unoccupied hosts to be powered-down until increased resource consumption requires the host to be powered back on. Typically, however, powering on and off physical hosts can be time consuming, and such delay can lead to the customer experiencing poor performance during periods of rapidly increasing resource demand. Moreover, traditional methods of physical host power management have been limited to managing physical resources available in a shared pool of computing resources. Lacking the ability to implement power/heat reduction techniques and evaluate status metrics for physical resources within a cloud computing environment limits, or in some instances, inhibits an administrator's ability to identify a physical host for executing a virtual machine that will optimize power performance.